Yesterday Euclideon released a video on YouTube with further insight and testimonials about Geoverse software which they claim provides virtually unlimited 3D data to be read and rasterized in real time.

Personal life and your private thoughts always effect your career. Research is the intellectual backbone of game development and the first order. Version Control is crucial for full management of applications and software. The better the workflow pipeline, then the greater the potential output for a quality game. Completing projects is the last but finest order.

I agree with you, though I understand that they are trying to control publicity to be more positive and give themselves an advantage in public relations. Sometimes this backfires when companies do it. A team on which I worked had a leader who didn't "have time to baby sit a website" according to him. Are they so confident about their product that they don't concern themselves with conversation about it at this time? Who knows what the motives are. I would have everything enabled for input and feedback of the video if it were left to me.

Clinton

Personal life and your private thoughts always effect your career. Research is the intellectual backbone of game development and the first order. Version Control is crucial for full management of applications and software. The better the workflow pipeline, then the greater the potential output for a quality game. Completing projects is the last but finest order.

It's really interesting. The real question is, whether it will be used much in games.

The real challenge would be to manage these massive chunks of data, making them dynamic and interact with each other (Not offline/baked!), until then, I shall keep playing with my polygons, as they are quiet useful.

I personally think the real rage and complains on the company came from their "unlimited" claim, which might not have been the suitable word to have used.

But again, this is just my opinion.

-MIGI0027

Edited by Migi0027, 14 October 2013 - 03:38 PM.

FastCall22: "I want to make the distinction that my laptop is a whore-box that connects to different network"

If Microsoft can halve their value of INFINITY (was 10, became 5) I'm sure they can get away with it.

Spamming out so many pair-tuple overloads, plus all of the emplacement overloads, consumed a massive amount of memory during compilation. Therefore, we reduced infinity. In Visual C++ 2008 SP1 and Visual C++ 2010, infinity was 10 (that is, "variadic" templates supported 0 to 10 arguments, inclusive). By default, infinity is 5 in Visual C++ in Visual Studio 2012. This brings compiler memory consumption back to what it was in Visual C++ 2010. If you need more arguments (for example, if you have existing code that uses 6-tuples), there is an escape hatch. You can define _VARIADIC_MAX project-wide between 5 and 10 inclusive. This consumes more memory, and may require that you use the /Zm compiler option to reserve more space for pre-compiled headers.

I see they cunningly tried to confuse my google-fu by spreading rumours the XBone would be called XBox Infinity! Infinitely clever! (5/10)

"Most people think, great God will come from the sky, take away everything, and make everybody feel high" - Bob Marley

And as discussed before, their claims are outlandish without qualifications.

I have seen large scientific datasets that are multiple terabytes of raw volumetric data. I don't care how good the rendering engine is, they're not going to handle it in real time at a high processing rate on today's hardware unless they have a fairly expensive computing center. They could certainly rent a bunch of nodes from Amazon or Google, but all that compute time and space won't be cheap.

When we review it and explain why it's not suitable, they stick their fingers in their ears and actually make up conspiracy theories as to why they're being "suppressed"...

I still have doubts but admit that they seem to have staying power.

As above, they've been trying to market it to games companies for a decade, unsuccessfully, because it's not a good fit for the majority of games (real-time shading, dynamic geometry, etc), and because they've for whatever reason, refused to bring an SDK to the general market, instead choosing only to attempt to sell it by face-to-face sales negotiations for big, big prices.

However, they did manage to net themselves a $2M "commercialization" grant from the Australian government, which they've used to re-brand as "Euclideon" and hire a board of directors and a bunch more staff (including some actual game-dev veterans). Since then, they've (sensibly) shifted their focus from games to geospatial, where some point-cloud innovation is actually needed.

It seems to be well received by the geospatial industry, which is nice after they finally gave up trying to force it into games where it didn't fit.

If you look at the latest Atomonage video (can't find the link ATM), he's doing similar work with geospatial datasets, of similar quality (though with a completely different rendering technique).

They don't need to fake it, you can buy their product already, though probably at an incredibly high price :/

Mining companies with their budgets, and all...

They're showing off a real product with real testimonials -- but that's not why it's controversial. It's controversial because they continually make misleading or false statements about their own tech, and especially about competing tech.
Even though their tech is real, this practice has ironically reduced them to being snake oil salesmen, and a joke in the games industry.

In the past they've deliberately confused 3rd party toolchains (that work the same with triangles, points, voxels) and their own tech, in a stupid attempt to confuse the viewer. They've compared detailed 3D scans (which are triangulated, and need to be voxelized to work with their own tech) and compared them to low-poly triangulated equivalents to show that triangles are teh dumb.

If you take Bruce Dell's words literally, in the past he's actually made claims of inventing O(1) search on infinite data sets, or infinite compression... and he wonders why people don't take him seriously... If he just spoke plainly and honestly about his tech, or ever spoke in a way targeting other developers (instead of speaking in a way that talks down to and misleads the tech-clueless public), he wouldn't have anywhere near as much animosity directed at him. None of his videos are pitching the tech to other tech-people, all his videos are showing off to the general public and misleading them.

Even in this video, they claim to have "solved all problems relating to working with...". That's a bit of a ridiculous exaggeration.

What if I want to view the scan of that city at a different time of day? How can I do that when their rendering tech doesn't allow for any real-time shading, and only supports baked shading? What if I want a surface normal? What if I need many attributes per point, such as specular channels? What if I want to drop in a simulated vehicle and drive over that scanned terrain? What if I want to use an anti-aliasing technique other than super-sampling? They also deride the "low resolution block" technique, but then later slyly explain that they themselves use it when streaming bandwidth isn't sufficient.
Again, their exaggerations and patronising tone are what's isolating them, IMO.

Those bold questions above is why game devs haven't been interested in their tech, along with the inability to render stuff other than static environments, like a skinned character...

I have seen large scientific datasets that are multiple terabytes of raw volumetric data. I don't care how good the rendering engine is, they're not going to handle it in real time at a high processing rate on today's hardware unless they have a fairly expensive computing center.

Or unless you don't actually touch 99% of the data. They'll have a ton of redundancy in their data, having many copies of the scene at different LODs.

Amazing technology. I could definitely see this being used later in games as a complete replacement for current LOD systems. Any flying game for instance could drop this in to remove their need for low polygon meshes on the ground. Their progress is also astounding in such a short time to invest that much R&D. Atomontage is probably the only other large scene voxelization tech I've seen, but it's no where near as polished yet.

Why do you say that claim is wrong or not the correct suitable word for it?

Unlimited means without limit. As in, you can have as much detail as you want, and nothing stops you from adding more.

Obviously storage is a limit, common sense says that they can only fit a finite (limited) amount of detail on any disk.
They never make any specific claims about their compression ratios, for example. However, when asked this in an interview, what the limits actually were with regards to scene complexity, he actually stuck to his guns and claimed there were no limits, which is akin to saying he's invented infinite compression... just silly. Even saying something like "obviously computers are finite, butit may as well be unlimited because we can easily fit an entire micro-detailed city into a gigabyte of storage", etc, etc, would be ok, because then it's a real claim, and not this exaggerated nonsense.
The actual statement I'm quoting here is:Interviewer: People were claiming that you must have some sort of memory limitations?Bruce Dell: Umm. No. The simple answer is: no.
and:

Those kind of stupid statements are why I make fun of him, saying he's claiming ∞:1 compression and O(1) search...

To be fair, they could have a search based on perfect hashing, which would allow for constant time rendering of any size scene, and they could have really-damn-good-compression... but that's not "unlimited".

Hodgman, it's not actually compression like going from Bitmap to Jpeg, where it's obviously a lossy format change. It's more along the lines of data compaction. Euclideon uses a proprietary format called .UDS. It's a zip file where they compact all points into a readable format. These compaction ratios are roughly 17% of original file size, which they've actually stated. And depending on the actual size of the asset, compaction could reduce that number down to only 5% of it's original size.

Also, what you were describing is more along the lines of "Unlimited Assets". Not "Unlimited Detail" in regards to those assets. They never stated they had Unlimited Storage, but art assets themselves will have ZERO limitation.

I'll explain it like this...

..Open Maya and load a primitive cube. Then load a second primitive cube, but this time, subdivide the cube until it's 10M Polygons. Euclideon has stated years ago, that their conversion technology converts at a rate of 64 Points Per Cubic MM.

Those two primitives are of IDENTICAL SIZE in actual 3D Space. So regardless of Polygon Count, when either asset is converted, they will convert to the IDENTICAL AMOUNT of Point Cloud. Euclideon is converting based on a measurement. A physical number associated to the proportions and dimensions of the asset. Not Each Polygon Individually.

The amount of polygons has no bearing on file size, nor does the size of the texture. A 256x256 texture would wrap around UVs the same as a 4096x4096 texture. When Euclideon converts, each point is given color attributes, which some have said is "vertex color" built for their own shader system. So Polygon Counts and Textures are irrelevant since it's technically an offline workflow for asset creation.

So again, the term "Unlimited Detail" in regards to art assets is actually correct and in no way an exaggeration.

Also, Unlimited Power does not mean Unlimited Hardware. There is no amount of geometry on screen that would slow the system down. If the technology renders 1 Point for Every Pixel, then regardless of how many assets are on screen, it would always render.

There wouldn't be a draw call count, because it's only searching for 2.0736M Points if you're rendering for 1080p. If you zoom in on an object, it may take up more pixels, but Euclideon's tech would still be searching for exactly 2.0736M pixels. Whether you're looking at one massive mountain taking up the whole screen or 1,000 trees in a forest, the exact same number of points will always be displayed.

The ability to bypass constraints due to polygon counts, texture counts, draw call counts..etc.. is not an exaggeration. It's the same reason they can "technically" load a 2TB file set in less than a second. When the data-set loads, they are only looking for those initial 2.0736M Points that are based on your cameras current position. It's not trying to load the entire file, it's only looking for those points that need to be displayed at that exact frame when the application launched.

Sorry for typing so much, couldn't find an easier way to be more concise about the topics I talked about.

Personal life and your private thoughts always effect your career. Research is the intellectual backbone of game development and the first order. Version Control is crucial for full management of applications and software. The better the workflow pipeline, then the greater the potential output for a quality game. Completing projects is the last but finest order.

One can process details/data/ whatever in time. Word unlimited means what? Size, or inlimited processing time reciprocal? Accounting they have reduced the geometry definition into a "half-picture", I would rather engourage myself in using 3d cube models with procedural details, if I went down the road of getting lost vertex attributes and 3d space definiton. Why don't they show an interactive animated human model, but stalks as with static stills? Did anyone of you who says they are serious run their demo or anything on their machine, with at least enough level of interaction, to prove real time processing?

..Open Maya and load a primitive cube. Then load a second primitive cube, but this time, subdivide the cube until it's 10M Polygons. Euclideon has stated years ago, that their conversion technology converts at a rate of 64 Points Per Cubic MM.

Well then, it's not "Unlimited" Detail, it's "64 Points Per Cubic MM" Detail, isn't it? I can't start from that flythrough in their video and zoom in all the way down to a guy's individual skin cell, can I? Because, with "Unlimited" Detail, I would be able to do just that, and even more, being, you know, *unlimited* and all

Which is perfectly fine, nobody realistically expects any contemporary technology to be able to do such feats; all people are saying is for them to drop the bullshit marketing slang which puts tech-savvy people off from the get go.